Kester Brewin

In response to a piece extolling the possible virtues of new technology for precipitating an educational revolution, I wrote a piece on HuffPost Tech reflecting on my own practice as a teacher, and how I feel technology should function in the classroom.

It’s the kind of conversation (one of so so many) I wish I could have with Nic. He spent his last years lecturing and was always aggressive in his defence of the concept of technology and tool use. Language, for him, was a technology too – and thus it was the symbiotic relationship between emerging tool use and speech that drove our evolution into homo sapiens.

I would agree with that, but want to reflect more carefully on where that relationship has got to. In particular, I’m really interested in what effect our technologies have on our human interactions. Language is clearly a relational technology: it allows us to interact in far more sophisticated ways than gestures or noises. Guns are also a technology that impacts human interaction. The ability to kill someone without being anywhere near them is extraordinary – and very very different to killing them hand to hand, or with a mutually connecting weapon like a sword.

So – this draws the question: if we are reflecting on the relational impact of technologies, and thus their ability to enhance or diminish human experience, what are we to make of digital technologies that mediate human interaction? Writing a letter is a technology as much as writing an email – but their human impact is (now) very different. Seeing someone on a screen, as anyone who has used Skype will know, is not the same as being in the room with them.

My concern with something like Google Glass is that it will add another layer of technological mediation to our interactions. We will literally be living life through a lens – a lens onto which will also be projected email notifications, news flashes, information. The thinness of this new mediating layer is crucial: it is currently thick enough for others to know that something might be going on as well as the conversation, but thin enough for it to seem like our interaction should be ‘real.’

I ended the HuffPost piece with this plea:

Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is not under-used technology that is holding an educational revolution back; perhaps the most under-valued and misunderstood thing in the classroom is the power of genuine human presence.

My hunch is that the most effective classroom, the one where we learn most deeply, can explore new ideas most richly, must, at least in part, be a place of unmediated human presence. It must be a place where we can attend to one another and give full attention to an idea, to interrogate it, to listen and consider our responses. This cannot happen, as Professor of English Mark Edmundson has brilliantly explored in an article that gets more and more prescient, if we are constantly dividing our attention into other virtual spaces.

He experienced that in 2008 as wifi, email and messenger while he was trying to lecture. But bring in Google Glass, and literally the whole class will be glazing over: who will be able to tell who is ‘there’ paying deep attention? Add in the pressure to be delivering lecture content over video, and a very worrying picture emerges: learners who have experienced the content of an education up to degree level, but not really paid proper attention once.

For anyone who cares about learning – and thus anyone who cares about human progress, conflict resolution, religious reformation, environmental action and political engagement – the debate about technology and genuine human presence is one that you need to be engaged in. Without it, we’ll be sleep-walking, Google-glazed, into a future we’ll be shocked Siri didn’t notify us about.

With the recent victory we had over Friends Life, it’s been a busy time talking about the campaign and thinking through more deeply what lessons can be learned from it. I’ve got a blog piece up over at the Huffington Post talking about the story behind the campaign, but I wanted to highlight one key thought from it:

We will never know if we would have won the case without the campaign, but the vital point is this: the enormous scale of support meant that Friends Life could not get away with a quiet loss. Having tried to weasel out of paying an ordinary family, the story of their humiliating defeat has been amplified to national news levels in a way that could never have happened without the work of Change.org.

This, I believe is a vital change in the landscape of campaigning. The twin prongs of the law and the media have now been given a third dimension: online petitions and social media. The addition of this third leg has the potential to give a new stability and democracy to activism. The law has always been where final decisions are arbitrated, and the national media where issues are investigated and probed by journalists. But with the dimension of social media and well-organised tools for online campaigning, ordinary people now have an effective way of bringing their stories of poor treatment by huge corporations into the picture.

The traditional media were superb throughout the campaign. We had huge support from journalists doing what they do best: balance, investigation, proper reporting. But it is always the law that has the real power to change things. What is brilliant about Change.org is how these two things – the law and the powerful mass media – are now given some democratic stability and balance by social media and campaigning tools like Change.

In other words, this is a good time for democracy, and a good time for campaigning. And it’s high time too – because right now it’s the law that’s under threat from government cuts and policies which will severely restrict people’s access to the law. They won it for us, and now the law needs us to support it. So please do consider signing a petition to persuade the government to change its mind.

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too.

I don’t want to talk much about the links with After Magic – other than to say if you’ve read the book, watch the film – and vice versa – as there really are some excellent resonances, (the film opens with the words, “we create our own demons”) and their shared ideas speak for themselves. However, I was left mulling over the ideas the film presents about our relationship to tools and technology, which I thought linked well with my recent post ‘Giving Up the Internet: ‘It’s Never About The Tools‘‘ and particularly the links between technology and identity.

In one scene in the film (I’ll try not to give away too much) Tony Stark has dragged his Iron Man suit into a dilapidated garage. A young boy comes in, sees the suit and hollers in amazement ‘Wow, it’s Iron Man!‘ To which Stark replies, ‘No, I’m Iron Man. Well, we both are. It’s complicated.‘

This is really the central question in the whole film: who is Iron Man? Is it the suit? The person inside the suit? The man who designed the suit? Or, if the suit turns out to be empty, or, worse still, being controlled by an imposter, is it even possible to say who Iron Man is at all?

What Tony Stark comes to realise is that, even when the iron shard is surgically removed from his rusting heart, he is Iron Man. Even when he is stripped of the suit and stands naked, all his fabulous technologies and protective cocooning devices ripped from him to leave him exposed…. even then, he is Iron Man.

It would be tempting to drift towards a Luddite position here, or say something about our innate humanity being about a place where we are device-and-technology-free. But the situation is more complex than that. We, humans, are tool-makers. It is our evolving tool use that has always made us what we are: social technology use is what made our brains grow and made us homo sapiens.

The film actually deals with this in a really clever way. Tony Stark’s revelation over the arc of the film is that he is Iron Man not because he wears the suit, nor because he controls the suit, but because he was the mechanic who put his craft into it. This is made explicit in the closing scenes of the film: Iron Man is the man who works with iron. He is the monger, the mechanic, the blacksmith, the welder, the carpenter…

This is brilliant (and links so well to Richard Sennett’s excellent book of practical philosophy, The Craftsman.) Put shortly: our humanity is not in our creations, but in our craft. This is why the artist will never be finished painting. They can never produce enough pieces to say ‘I’m done, this is me in my entirety, on canvas’ because their identity is not tied up in their creations, but in the relationship they have to their craft of creating them. Process, not product.

This is an important lesson. We project so much of our identities onto our devices, on the things that clothe us: phones, brands, pictures… But doing so leaves us empty. We know in ourselves that we are not these things. Deskilled by consumer-capitalist approaches to labour we find we that substituting consumption for craft is unsatisfactory: buying the latest iPhone or another pair of jeans gives some kind of temporary bump to our need for validation… but ends up unfulfilling… just as the artist’s feeling of satisfaction on completing a work is only fleeting.

Yet, importantly, we also know that we are not Luddites. Whether using them or consuming them by proxy, tool-use is part of what it is to be human, and we should celebrate that rather than strive to rid ourselves of it.

What Iron Man 3 reveals is that our humanity is enhanced by our focusing on the process of our craft: it is neither in the purchasing of devices, nor even the display of own creations using them that our identity is enhanced; it is in the craft, the process, the imagination combined with problem solving and skilful manipulation that we find something deeper about who we are.

Park

They will come here
all of them in
different groups and
all of them do
what they shouldn’t
………………………….like
smoke on benches
let dogs run wild
climb up slides
and push.

This is the park where,
on common ground through
uncommon years
we take our turns
and rebel.

 

© KB 2013

 

Was in the local park the other day, kicking a ball with my kids… They are such interesting city spaces, places where boundaries are pushed, all the play equipment used for something other than that for which it was designed: running up the slide, pushing the swings over the bar. Kids of 14 or 15 lounging on the roundabout, taking drags. And yet there’s something beautiful in this. Richard Sennett would call it the natural craftsman: children testing out materials and equipment to see what things they can do, not just using them for what they should do. Just as the older ones do with their bodies. Just as we all later do with our thoughts. Parklife.

Brilliant weekend away over the Bank Holiday, with loads of surfing, go-karting and some great evening conversations with a bright and challenging bunch of friends. One of the most interesting areas we talked about was around privacy in future technologies, and, when I outlined my major concerns about Google Glass-type devices I was quite surprised [...]

Tech writer Paul Miller’s contentious experiment to log-off from internet devices for a whole year is coming to an end in two weeks (HT Maggi Dawn for the story, which she flagged on facebook this morning), and in a very frank and illuminating article (sent in by post, no doubt – he has had no [...]

Went to see The Book of Mormon last night. I’ll be reviewing it on William Crawley’s BBC Radio show on Sunday morning, but thought I’d blog a few thoughts here too. Firstly, it’s a great musical. I’m no great fan of musical theatre to be honest [in mathematical terms, it's non-additive music (fab) + theatre [...]

Tad Delay has written a great couple of punchy paragraphs thinking about Boston, radicalised youth and the problem of religion within empires. What town in America goes a single year without producing young men who – amidst the college-aged angst of life directions, relationships, or career fears – turn to religious fundamentalism and/or militant violence? [...]

A good friend Jonny spent a week or so in silence in the hills of Wales recently, and has been blogging really beautifully about the experience. The term I don’t like that’s often used for these periods is ‘retreat’ – it’s too military for me, and carries with it a sense of moving backwards. Though [...]

Dear Maggie if people cared less about your passing or felt less willing to pay for your parade this too was what you did to us. And if people turn backs or appear a little harsh and cruel then remember, iron lady this caring less this selfishness was you. So let the pomp begin and [...]